The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

I wasn't always black... there was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

It isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that's beautiful.

The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it.

Love is the only reality, everything else is secondary.

He's sort of a Svengali... It means someone who's manipulative. More than that: somebody who makes you think that you need him in order to accomplish anything.

Poverty must be erased by hard work.

Rose was so full of life and passion that sometimes she seemed more human than I was.

When government disappears, it's not as if paradise will take its place. When governments are gone, other interests will take their place.

A few years ago he had a big heart transplant in Chicago, a five-hour operation. It took the doctors four hours to get him on the operating table.

Writing. Love is writing.

Sleep is perverse as human nature, Sleep is perverse as a legislature, Sleep is as forward as hives or goiters, And where it is least desired, it loiters.

Looks to me, Vince, like you hit a hole in one.

I will be free, even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.